On the Cover: Drake

Drake is living the high life. Claire Hoffman gets up close and personal with the rising hip-hop sensation

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The backyard of Drake’s mansion is indistinguishable from the set of one of those late-night Lifetime soft-core romance flicks. Waterfalls gush all around, surging over enormous boulders. Bronze animals—lions, elephants, giraffes!—checker the lawn, glimmering in the last light of the San Fernando Valley sun. A giant fire, fit for a king from Middle-earth, burns in an outdoor fireplace, and a flat-screen TV plays Sixteen Candles.

In the foreground of this lady-fantasy tableau sits Drake, who has the six-one body of a well-built man but the dodgy eye contact of a teenager. (At first, anyway.) He awaits me on a couch with more chintz pillows than I can count, wearing baggy jeans and Jordans, his simple gray T-shirt accentuated by two long diamond-rope necklaces, lest I forget that he is _25 sittin’ on 25 mil. _At the ready are a bottle of chilled white wine and a pitcher of ice, for tonight we shall drink wine spritzers, his favorite beverage and also mine.

"If you went down the waterslide," he says, taking my hand, helping me over the stones that cross his blue lagoon, pointing to a chute running down a steep two-story cliff above the pool, which, by the way, is filled with statues of nude women, "how amazing would that be for your article?"

Dreams have come true for Drake, and tonight he looks to be in a sharing mood. He’s going to ignore my pen and my tape recorder and my list of questions and open up his soft, emotive heart as if we were on the most amazing first date ever.

Less than four years ago, he was just Aubrey Drake Graham, a high school dropout and former child actor writing rhymes in the basement of his mom’s house in Toronto, stopping only to trip out on text messages from girls or find out where that night’s party might be. Drake’s parents split up when he was 5, and he lived in a bifurcated world, between everyday life with his mom—affluent, white, and Jewish Canadian—and the special visits and occasional summers with his father, who’s black, from Memphis, and a bit of a ne’er-do-well. When I ask him about his dad, his voice tightens, and he looks away. "Me and my dad are friends. We’re cool. I’ll never be disappointed again, because I don’t expect anything anymore from him. I just let him exist, and that’s how we get along. We laugh. We have drinks together. But I spent too many nights looking by the window, seeing if the car was going to pull up. And the car never came."

Still, he identifies with his father and his ability to hustle, to get what he wants while having a good time. "I’ve never been reckless—it’s always calculated," Drake says. "I’m mischievous, but I’m calculated." So as a 15-year-old, with a successful acting career in motion, he quietly plotted his second act: hip-hop superstar.

**GQ: What’s the first rap album you listened to? **

Drake: When my dad drove me to Memphis one time from Toronto, it was a 20-something hour drive. I brought my Doggystyle cassette. I asked him, "Dad, can I please play this? Mom won’t let me play it in the house." He was like, "Yeah. You can play it for 20 minutes. And then we listen to an hour of my music."

**GQ: And what was that? **

Drake: That was Al Green, that was the Spinners, that was Sade. That was Marvin Gaye. At the time, I was like, "Aw, man, come on, 20 minutes?" But it really was pivotal for me because I started listening to the melodies and the emotion in this music that he was playing me. It grabbed me maybe even a little more than that Doggystyle cassette did. I would say that I’m more moved by melody, even though I love to rap.

GQ: But did you want to be an actor when you were a kid?

Drake: That’s all I wanted to do, at first. I loved music. I just didn’t necessarily believe in music being the focus right away. But I used to watch, at the time, young kids that were poppin’—it was B2K and Bow Wow. It was that generation of the R&B group, and the sort of every song is a "girl" song—it was all targeted towards screaming girls—the Scream Tour. You remember?

**GQ: Uh, is this like Kriss Kross? **

Drake: No. This is after. This is like, when I’m old enough to say, "I want to be these guys" or "I want to be in that position." This is like a very young Chris Brown, a very young Lil Wayne. That was Scream Tour—any act that made the girls scream. There was definitely a point where I would watch that and be like, "Yo." I would watch these young kids and I would say, "Damn. I want to be there. I just want to do it different." Because it’s like I didn’t want my career to be based off of some of the things that they were known for, like having my shirt off.

**GQ: Wait, so you were thinking about your career at 15? **

Drake: Yeah, 15, 16, I mean, 17, 18, is when I was really getting into that hip hop phase, you know, and really studying the things that I needed to study as far as learning about flows and learning about lyrics.

**GQ: So how did you end up on a TV show? [Degrassi: The Next Generation, a Canadian show.] You sound like an ambitious kid. **

Drake: I was in class, and I used to always crack jokes in class. I was a good liar and a good talker. And this kid in my class was like, "Yo, my dad is an agent. You should go talk to him because you’re good and you make people laugh." I was just good. I was my father’s son. I was slick, you know? When it comes to knowing what to say, to charm, I always had it.

Drake borrowed money from his uncle and recorded _Room for Improvement, _his first mixtape, full of bass and braggadocio. And just like that, Lil Wayne was on the phone, calling to say he liked what he heard. Twelve number one singles, a few mixtapes, and a pair of studio albums later, it’s hard to listen to the radio and _not _hear Drake’s voice, telling you he’s too strung out on compliments, overdosed on confidence.

Staring into the fire, he tells me he’s part of a new generation of rappers, one that is less defined by aggression and street credibility. "Rap now is just being young and fly and having your shit together," he says. "The mood of rap has changed." So has the way you get huge as a rapper. Drake launched his career via a blog and MySpace; now he’s one of the biggest artists in the world. He’s keenly aware of the power— and the panoptic demands—of the social networks that made him. "Some of my favorite rappers, some of my heroes"—DJ Screw, Aaliyah—"there might be like 200 pictures of them because there was no Internet," he says. "Whereas with us, it’s like every moment is documented."

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GQ: So how do you deal with that?

Drake: I’m obsessed with perfection. I want to work. I don’t want to take this for granted. I don’t want to sit out here and say, well, I could stop right here and say, "Okay. I own this. You know, it’s cool. I could stop," but why? I don’t want to stop. I want to take advantage and make myself the best possible me that I can be. So I’m going to work in the gym two hours a day. And try and be up there on stage, looking strong, looking iconic.

GQ: You keep using the term iconic. Is that the same as perfection?

Drake: I don’t mean perfection as far as a visual image of perfection. I mean, "perfection" to me is, I walk away from a situation and say, "I did everything I could do right there. There was nothing more that I could do." I was a hundred percent, like the meter was at the top. There was nothing else I could have done. You know? Like, I worked as hard as I possibly could have. That’s perfection.

While he’s quick to say, "I’m actually really happy," the fame dome has its challenges, and much of the music on his latest album, _Take Care, _reveals a conflicted soul. "I’m trying to find the same feelings that I had for women when I had very little going on, which is tough," he says. "When I was in my mom’s house, I had nowhere to go, no real obligations. My girlfriend at the time, if she was mad at me, my day was all fucked-up. I didn’t have anything else. And that made for some of the best music, I think, to date. Records where I felt small. That feeling is hard to capture when you’re sitting out here in a space like this." He gestures to the pool, the tennis court, the volleyball court, the stables. "It’s really difficult for me to find something that makes me feel small."

GQ: So, is that what you want? To feel small?

Drake: That’s the conflict you’re hearing. I’m describing to you what you’re hearing in my music. It’s got nothing to do with fame or the position that I’m in. I’m happy there is just one aspect of my life that I miss, which is how big those situations used to feel. And not that it felt good. Sometimes it was big pain. Sometimes it was big hurt. Whereas now I’m very—throughout my life, not just with women—I try and remain a very controlled individual.

GQ: So artistically, you miss the pain?

Drake: That’s exactly what it is. Artistically. Inspiration-wise. Knowing you don’t have any other option—you got one place to go. To your mom’s house. That’s it. Go drive home. I miss that, artistically.

**GQ: So what can you replace that with? **

Drake: New stories, I guess. I just have to find a way to describe it so vividly that it’s relatable, because if I don’t, if it’s not vivid enough, then no one will be able to relate to me. You sitting here in this atmosphere, you can relate to what I’m saying. But if I tried to tell you about this, I don’t know if you’d feel it the same way. You understand what I’m saying?

**GQ: I do. **

Drake: I don’t want to go brag about this shit. "Oh, I just got the new crib with the pool." ’Cause it just sounds stupid to you. But then you come here, and you’re like, "Oh, shit. Okay, I get it. You’re a kid from Toronto and you live here now. This is fucked up."

Spritzer in hand, he spreads himself out on the couch and acknowledges that, yes, he had a spell there when he was fucking tons of girls&but that just wasn’t right for him: "There’s just a time where it was like, just getting pussy. Where I was in that sort of ’I’m young, I’m going to disconnect from my emotions and just do what everyone else tells me I should do and just be a rapper and have my fun.’ And for me as a person, it just doesn’t work. I just need something else. The seconds after a man reaches climax, that’s like the realest moment of your life. If I don’t want you next to me in that fifteen, twenty seconds, then there’s something wrong."

The fire starts to die out, _Sixteen Candles _comes to an end, and I ask if I can see his closet—after all, he designed his own $5,000 arctic-fox-fur, gold-hardware bomber jacket. We wander into the house, a woody manor. Drake enters some numbers into a keypad on a bookshelf and—presto!—it swings open into his massive, paisley swathed sleeping chamber, complete with a California king bed, for which he must purchase custom sheets.

When I ask about the strange square above the bed, he grabs a remote, and a projection system emerges from the ceiling. Neato, I say.

"Would I have you already?" he asks. "Are you sleeping with me?"

Time to go!

It’s a hypothetical question (I think), but Drake, being Drake, still wants an answer: "We had wine and dinner by the pool, I brought you inside, I brought the projector down; are you or are you not sleeping with me?"

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